Yesterday was our last GeeTAG get together for 2017 and we partied with delicious food, had fun making tricky origami books and secret boxes and continued stitching for our 10 year celebratory exhibition next year.

Here is a taster of some works in progress that will be on show at “Breaking Traditions”, The Shearer’s Arms Gallery, Geelong, March 16-18, 2018.

The 2018 program has been sent out. Don’t forget to email your March exhibition entry forms through to Jenny by 5th February 2018, do not leave it to the February meeting as it is after the cut off date.

We will be starting 2018 at our first meeting on 10th February with Mixed media and the Golden Scrolls for our Embroiderer’s Guild 50th Anniversary exhibition in September.

Contact Leonie or sign up Monday for the Summer School, get in early before it is opened up to other branches of the Guild or you may miss out.

There was an abundance of beautiful work on show from our productive members at our May meeting.

First up was Pauline with an explanation and great examples of Faux leather. This fitted in beautifully with our theme of recycling for our May postcards with the possible re-use of all those brown paper bags.

Our other topic for discussion was felting. This arose from the tendency for people to gift me their accidently felted woollens for recycling. There were some lovely examples of needle felting and wet felting.

A dressed Scallywag:

Now onto the finished and in-progress pieces on display.

Firstly the April postcards where the theme was ‘Dancing the night away’ and ‘bling, bling, bling’.

We had some icons appearing for March:

We had book pages and covers from Jill:

We even had a finished May postcard using recycled materials:

Many of our members were inspired after the Velma Bolyard workshop and went home to spin paper and make more shifu:

Wow, you are a talented bunch.

Next meeting is June with our 15 minutes of fame spot with Robyn and a theme of ‘Out of Africa’- sure to bring out the wild side!

Our first meeting for the year saw 23 of our 30 members join us to begin our first piece of postcard art. The suggested project for this year is to try out some interesting techniques on a postcard sized piece of art. These will be kept together in a box which many of our members have finished after receiving a bonbon of goodies at our end of 2015 xmas gathering.

Some boxes, finished and in progress:

Texture and maps

Beautiful boxes

Pauline brought along a box and postcard to show made from gummy silk, embedded synthetic lace, lumiere paints and tyvek:

Silky Box

We also had some great results on display from last years shibori experiments:

Hopefully we will have some postcards to show at our March meeting based on the theme wings and using the techniques of layering, collage and/or distressing. Perhaps give the technique with the incense sticks a go?

Our March meeting will feature two mini tutorials: Water soluble paper and foiling, an email will go out about two weeks prior with info.

Our November meeting saw a treasure trove of handmade books revealed. Thank you to Kerrie for her knowledgeable chat on the art of bookmaking. A few of the books and covers displayed:

Needleweaving on the coptic binding

Detail of Pauleen’s bookcover

We are all now working on finishing our technique samplers from each month to put into our individual Book of 2014. Remember to leave the cover until after our December meeting, Kerrie will have a surprise package for all to incorporate.